Jenny Dixon on motherhood: ‘It’s chaos, but our twins make it all worthwhile’

“We’re not getting a lot of sleep at times — let’s say the make-up has to be good at the moment,” she laughs

But it’s “just magical”, the actress adds. “We have these little angels and it’s lovely. It’s madness, it’s chaos, but overall it’s just happiness and contentment.”

Caring for 12-week-old Bella Sky and Capri Lucia is full on, as you’d expect. “Tom and I each take care of different departments. Tom looks after sterilising the bottles, he looks after the cots and building the rocker. I do the baths, the baby laundry, and buy the little baby clothes.

“Whoever seems like they’re out of sleep reserves, the other says ‘look, I’ll do the night shift tonight and you sleep’. Tom tends to wake in the night like some kind of noble guardian to see if the babies are OK and he’s often exhausted, so I let him sleep then.”

Jenny sees it as a gift that the nurses got the twins in a routine of nappy change/feed/wind/sleep during their six-week neonatal stay. “But, as for any new parent, the routine could always be better. It’s not foolproof at night, like if one twin regurgitates, you’re thinking ‘oh, it’s not your feed-time for another two hours’, and then our sleep is down to four hours.

“At the moment we’re keeping them up more during the day — up for two hours, sleep for two hours and so on — and having lots of stimulation with tummy time and toys, so they’ll sleep more at night.”

Struggles to conceive

But Jenny’s grateful even for the tiredness that comes from caring for her tiny daughters. “Nothing compares to the tiredness of trying to have [a baby],” she says, referring to her struggles to conceive. She prefers the term ‘fertility assistance’ to the more technical IVF: “It’s a softer terminology. It normalises things — just like you’d go for any assistance.”

It takes stamina, she says, to keep that manifestation alive: that pregnancy is going to happen. “There were times when it was harder to keep the hope going, but predominantly I kept that positivity — because why not? You may as well keep the glass half-full, so my hope and faith remained strong.

“But I also allowed myself to think that whichever way it was destined to go was OK, that life would still be beautiful. And that came to me just before I got success,” she says, confirming that she and Tom — a former Fine Gael TD — “became successfully pregnant” on their third wedding anniversary.

“I laughed and I shed tears. We had masks on because it was the height of covid and we took them down so we could see each other’s expressions. The stenographer asked ‘how many embryos are you thinking?’ I said one. She said ‘Well, I’m going to show you — there are two’.

“Tom said ‘you don’t need to tell me the gender, I already know’, and he told [the stenographer] about the dream he had years before he met me, where he had seen twin daughters running around a garden — and their dresses and ribbons were in the same style as what I would wear.”

So the stenographer wrote the babies’ gender on a piece of paper and the couple opened it that evening. “It said ‘your dream just came true — it’s two girls’. I shrieked with joy. It was a very special moment of euphoria.”

Bella and Capri are monoamniotic twins, meaning they shared the same amniotic sac in the womb. The phenomenon is very rare, representing less than 0.1% of all pregnancies.

“It’s a rare, high-risk pregnancy,” says Jenny, who was monitored closely. “I was scanned every week from the start of pregnancy. In the latter part I was scanned as an outpatient every day.”

She was also on anti-nausea medicine (“I stopped it once and ended up in A&E on Christmas Eve with continued vomiting”). She had to build up her iron levels and got “a bit of sciatica” towards the end of pregnancy.

But she loved the birth — a planned C-section. “I had an amazing consultant and I knew all the midwives. February 20 this year was really one of the best days of my life. A beautiful bright, sunny day. It was a very emotional day. Tom had told everybody he was squeamish — in the end, he was more than happy to see the two babies being pulled out. I loved every second of that day.”

Not all plain sailing

While the couple she and Tom are closer than ever, she says it’s not “all petals and roses”.

“There’s the strain of no sleep and quite often no food for hours because we don’t have time.

“But we make time for each other — we’ve been having a date night on the weekend where we just step away from nappies and bottles. A friend who’s a nurse comes in to mind the babies.”

It was only when they got their “little Easter chicks” home in April that they realised the amazingly close bond between their girls. “In NICU, they were in separate cots. When we put them together at home, we saw the magnetism, the bond — it’s magical. They just love being around each other.”

The proud parents can spot little differences between them.

“It’s even down to facial expressions. Bella’s more expressive, she has an occasional grumpiness and then bursts into a smile.

“Capri’s more serene, more chilled. Bella goes to her for reassurance. That could change of course,” says Jenny, adding that it’s not impossible to tell her identical twins apart because Capri has a little strawberry birthmark and is somewhat paler.

I ask Jenny which parts of her day she loves best.

“When there’s a window of 30 minutes, where the babies are quiet, the house is clean and Tom is out on an errand. I have an avocado toast and fried egg lunch with a cup of tea and watch one of my Netflix switch-off shows. Sometimes it doesn’t happen until 3pm.”

And the other time she loves is around 10pm.

“Quite often we might all be in bed together, four in a row, going off to sleep... it’s like a beautiful sleepover. 

As a child I loved sleepovers and now every night I feel like I’m having my own sleepover party.”

The little girls’ names have an Italian connection, Jenny explains. Capri is named for the Isle of Capri where Tom proposed to her and Bella is called after Jenny’s great-grandaunt Bella who raised her grandmother.

“Bella Sky means beautiful sky — so the sky’s the limit, anything she can dream of she can do.”

Jenny played Kerri-Ann Bishop in Fair City and, when it comes to acting, “there are definitely things on the vision board”, she says. “I love being on set. I would welcome other opportunities. If the role is right, Tom and I will make it work.”

Meanwhile, she’s dreaming of all the things she’s going to do with her girls. “Introduce them to colour and to storybooks and show them rose petals and daisies and bring them to the zoo, help them start to crawl and bring them to the beach, let them paddle their feet in the ocean, introduce them to family, help them develop their imagination — and hear them laugh.”